Monday, June 30, 2003
OpenOffice for Mac goes gold
OpenOffice, the free, open source office suite that reads and writes Word, Excel and PowerPoint files (as well as including a nice drawing app), has gone gold for OS X. This first stable release is enormous (170MB download!), and it uses X-Windows (a Unix graphical user interface that accounts for much of the download size), but it's free, it doesn't feed the beast, and it lets you interoperate with your Microsoft Office-using pals without dropping $500 on a piece of technology intended to lock you into an expensive upgrade cycle.
There's a MacOS-native version in the works, too -- one that uses Aqua, OS X's built-in window manager. It's exciting to see this stuff maturing. Mozilla is getting tighter and tighter, providing a real alternative to Explorer and Safari, one that users can hack cool applications out of, like Kevin Burton's Newsmonster. Now, with the maturation of OpenOffice, which runs on every major OS, there's hope that we'll be able to get a full suite of tools that respect our freedom and provide an open platform for innovation. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:10:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
